Thanks for the reply. You make an excellent point on the systems aspect of all this. And I personally agree things like poverty, fishery depletion, and so on ar

Thanks for the reply. You make an excellent point on the systems aspect of all this. And I personally agree things like poverty, fishery depletion, and so on are important issues to address. But, I am not sure Freeman Dyson intended to imply these are disconnected problems. With his broad-ranging mind, Freeman Dyson was definitely a systems thinker -- though with a bias to quantification. Assuming what you say is true, he might ask, to what degree are those problems made worse by CO2-driven climate change? 1%? 10%? 100%? 1000%? Assuming that is a significant amount, we can choose to invest some resources to reduce emissions and/or we can choose to invest some resource to mitigate the consequences and/or we can choose to invest resources in some other way like space program, UBI, the arts, creating 1000s of free water-only-fasting and nutritional-reeducation health clinics like True North Healthcare to deal with the "diabesity" crisis overwhelming the USA and making things like respiratory viruses more deadly given comorbidities, to come up with safer plastics and safe ways to detox people of their current microplastics, and so on. "Water-only Fasting" https://www.healthpromoting.com/water-only-fasting https://www.healthpromoting.com/water-only-fasting "Woodstock Occurred in the Middle of a Pandemic" https://www.aier.org/article/woodstock-occurred-in-the-middle-of-a-pandemic/ https://www.aier.org/article/woodstock-occurred-in-the-middl... "Lifespan in the US in those days was 70 whereas it is 78 today. Population was 200 million as compared with 328 million today. It was also a healthier population with low obesity. If it would be possible to extrapolate the death data based on population and demographics, we might be looking at a quarter million deaths today from this virus. So in terms of lethality, it was as deadly and scary as COVID-19 if not more so, though we shall have to wait to see." Which of those options should we do to what degree? That is the sort of question Freeman Dyson might ask. On the other hand, maybe the alarms are overblown and CO2 increase at this point is mostly a non-issue? ==== More details If you want to go one step further in considering systems effects, consider this article from 2022: "Why global warming is good for us: Climate change is creating a greener, safer planet." https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/15/why-global-warming-is-good-for-us/ https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/15/why-global-warming-... "Global warming is real. It is also – so far – mostly beneficial. This startling fact is kept from the public by a determined effort on the part of alarmists and their media allies who are determined to use the language of crisis and emergency. The goal of Net Zero emissions in the UK by 2050 is controversial enough as a policy because of the pain it is causing. But what if that pain is all to prevent something that is not doing net harm? The biggest benefit of emissions is global greening, the increase year after year of green vegetation on the land surface of the planet. Forests grow more thickly, grasslands more richly and scrub more rapidly. This has been measured using satellites and on-the-ground recording of plant-growth rates. It is happening in all habitats, from tundra to rainforest. In the four decades since 1982, as Bjorn Lomborg points out, NASA data show that global greening has added 618,000 square kilometres of extra green leaves each year, equivalent to three Great Britains. You read that right: every year there’s more greenery on the planet to the extent of three Britains. I bet Greta Thunberg did not tell you that. The cause of this greening? Although tree planting, natural reforestation, slightly longer growing seasons and a bit more rain all contribute, the big cause is something else. All studies agree that by far the largest contributor to global greening – responsible for roughly half the effect – is the extra carbon dioxide in the air. In 40 years, the proportion of the atmosphere that is CO2 has gone from 0.034 per cent to 0.041 per cent. That may seem a small change but, with more ‘food’ in the air, plants don’t need to lose as much water through their pores (‘stomata’) to acquire a given amount of carbon. So dry areas, like the Sahel region of Africa, are seeing some of the biggest improvements in greenery. Since this is one of the poorest places on the planet, it is good news that there is more food for people, goats and wildlife." (I have a lot of issues with Bjorn Lomborg's work, but on that greening I think he is probably mostly correct.) Also from the article: "But are we not told to expect more volatile weather as a result of climate change? It is certainly assumed that we should. Yet there’s no evidence to suggest weather volatility is increasing and no good theory to suggest it will. The decreasing temperature differential between the tropics and the Arctic may actually diminish the volatility of weather a little." (Continued in another comment.)